Jack Chalker: Quest for the Well of Souls

The creature floated slowly by the Yaxa and up to the blackness of the Well Gate. It turned, nodded again, and drifted into the Gate, sharply visible as a strange specter before it was swallowed up. The Yaxa followed, more nervous now than ever, and emerged from the South Zone Well Gate instantaneously.

The Yugash floated up to it, touched it. The Yaxa felt an eerie, uncomfortable tingling, but nothing else. It was suddenly chilled, stuffy, nervous. Blending into the Yaxa body, the Yugash had now vanished.

There were a few other creatures about in Zone, but none gave the Yaxa much notice. The huge butterflies were cold and aloof always, and they inspired fear in some others. Only another Yaxa would have noticed how awkward the creature seemed, how unsure of itself.

It entered the Yaxa embassy, almost bruising its wings on the doorway. Inside were the ambassador and several other Yaxa leaders—all females. The male of the species was groundbound, a soft, pulpy caterpillar designed for only one purpose, and it responded with abandon. The males were kept dormant until needed. The Yaxa female always ate her mate after.

The ambassador looked concerned. “There is something wrong?”

The newcomer stopped and wobbled unsteadily on four tentacles. Its voice was hard to understand, and it was unlike anything they had ever heard before.

“I am the Torshind of Yugash,” it mumbled. “You must forgive me. I am still learning to use this body. In Yugash we grow the bodies we need, and they are of good crystals and bred to their tasks. Yours is an incredibly complex creature, and there is also a great deal of resistance from the host.”

“Do you mean,” one asked, “that you are a Northern creature currently occupying the body of our sister?”

The strange Yaxa nodded. “Yes. Will you please instruct the creature not to resist me so? We cannot complete this test until I am in complete control of the cranial area.”

They all looked nervous, uncomfortable now, both from the implications of what they were seeing and hearing and from being called “creatures.”

“Please!” asked the Torshind again. “Do so or one of two alternatives will result. I shall either have to abandon the body, or there will be permanent brain damage!”

That last got them. “Hypno!” one ordered, and soon a syringe to Yaxa requirements was produced.

The doctor, if that was what she was, looked uncertain. “You’re sure this won’t put you under, too?” she asked, worried. “And a total takeover—it’s reversible?”

The Yaxa-Yugash nodded. “Totally. The creature will simply not be able to recall more than dimly the possession. Come! It is becoming more difficult!”

The syringe was inserted through a joint, and in a few minutes the jerking ceased. The Yaxa was in a deep hypnotic sleep. Suddenly it became animated. It rose on all eight tentacles confidently, flexing its wings and tentacles. It donned a Yaxa pressure suit.

“That is much better,” said the Torshind. “I am in complete control now. I would have to spend several days in a body as complex as this to learn it all, but I think I can manage. Shall we go?”

They left, the whole party, and walked to the nearest Zone Gate. Everyone, including the Torshind, was tense.

The ambassador and the project leader entered the Zone Gate first, then the Yaxa-Yugash, followed by the rest.

In his office far down the corridor, Serge Ortega cursed. His monitors had told him everything except whether the experiment had worked. Was the Torshind now in Yaxa or in Yugash?

Only the Yaxa knew, but Ortega would fix that.

The Gedemondan, almost three meters high, of white fur, with padlike legs and a dog’s snout, chuckles.

“But the true test of awesome power is the ability not to use it.” He looks toward her and points a clawed, furry finger.

“No matter what, Mavra Chang, you remember that!” he warns sharply.

She feels puzzled. “You think I’m to have great power?” she asks skeptically and a little derisively, reflecting the way she feels about such mysticism.

“First you must descend into Hell,” the Gedemondan warns her. “Then, only when hope is gone, will you be lifted up and placed at the pinnacle of attainable power, but whether or not you will be wise enough to know what to do with it or what not to do with it is closed to us.”

Vistaru, the Lata pixie challenges it. “How do you know all this?” she asks.

The Gedemondan chuckles. “We read probabilities. You see, we see —perceive is a better word—the math of the Well of Souls. We feel the energy flow, the ties and bands, in each and every particle of matter and energy. All reality is mathematics, all existence — past, present, and future — is equations.”

“Then you can foretell what’s to happen,” Renard the Agitar satyr points out. “If you see the math you can solve the equation.”

The Gedemondan sighs. “What is the square root of minus two?” it asks smugly.

Mavra Chang awoke, the words of the snow-giant echoing as always in her ears. She’d dreamed that dream a thousand times since the actual event. How long ago? Twenty-two years, the Ambreza doctor had said.

She had been twenty-seven then; she was approaching fifty now. All those years, she thought, lying here on her cushions. A lifetime.

She stretched, and thought about it for a bit. About herself, how she had changed so much in the years.

She no longer thought about the time she’d been human. She knew they’d hypno-burned that impression into her twenty-two years before, but it had worn off, in time, with the dreams and the thoughts.

And, for a while, it had mattered. She remembered the Gedemondans, even if they’d made sure nobody else did—their power and wisdom, the way one of them had simply pointed a finger at the engine pods and they had toppled and exploded.

She remembered being captured by the Olbornians—great bipedal cats in ancient livery—and taken to their temple, where they had touched her extremities to that curious stone. But she couldn’t remember what life was like before that.

Oh, she remembered her past, but somewhere, years before, something had snapped inside her. She remembered that part of her life only in a lopsided, distorted way: everyone she remembered looked like her—the beggars, the whores, the pilots, her husband. Mentally, she saw them all as the kind of creature she had become—even though she knew she was a freak and that the people of her past did not resemble her present form.

That was right after the last time she’d tried to escape, to run for the border, to somehow find out what the hell the Gedemondan meant.

Doing so didn’t seem so important, either, anymore.

She had brooded and dreamed and sunk into a tremendous, suicidal depression after that, and then the change had come over her. She didn’t understand it, but she accepted it.

On a world with 1560 races, there was room enough for one more, a Chang, if you will.

And Joshi had come along just after that, as if in answer to this new feeling inside her.

She rolled over and got up unsteadily. It was no simple task, yet she’d done it so often it had become second nature. She stretched again, and her long hair swung down over her face. She didn’t mind that it reached the floor both in front and behind her ears; no more than she minded that her horse’s tail was now a great broom, trailing behind her.

She walked over to a low, two-meter-long mirror, and turned her head, shaking it a bit to clear the hair from her eyes.

You’ve changed in more ways than one, Mavra Chang, she told herself.